In the countryside, a Justice was expected to be a gentleman, and a figure of some standing in his community. He had powers, and those powers were traded for influence and respect in the rural body of England, but here, in London, the choking and congested heart of an empire, the Justices took another currency. The populace ignored them when they could, and paid them off when they could not. There were exceptions, of course. Since the Fielding brothers had shown what a Magistrate might be in London from their house in Bow Street, the situation had improved, but it was said that barely half the Magistrates of London could write their own name, and the fragile peace of the city still rested on the ancient and ignored Officers of the Watch, the Constables unable to pay their way out of their obligations to the parish, the prosecutions of thief-takers, the rough justice of the crowds, and the occasional intervention of the troops. It seemed that Mr Pither was trying to follow more in the footsteps of the Fieldings than suck up his living in the wake of the other sort of Justice. Harriet might be a little sceptical about his chances of success, but the little man should be encouraged, surely.
‘Sir,’ she said, with a graceful nod of her head. The man hurrumphed into his cravat and looked pleased. ‘You have mentioned the manner in which this body was found, but no specifics. What was unusual?’
A young male voice spoke from the shadows at the back of the little room. ‘He was tied.’
Harriet, startled, found herself looking for a moment at the corpse itself. Then from the gloom behind the body two men wearing the red jackets of the Thames Watermen came forward into the little ring of light. The shadows of the room went back a long way.
The man who had spoken looked almost a child, lithe and slender with high cheekbones, and smooth-skinned enough for Harriet to wonder if he was yet out of his teens. Shuffling out of the dark beside him was an older man, bearded and a little stooped though his chest was broad and his hands, held clenched at his sides, looked fearsome enough. Justice Pither waved towards them.
‘These are the fellows who brought him in. They run a wherry from the Black Lyon Stairs. This is Proctor, and this his nephew Jackson. I thought perhaps you might wish to speak to them.’
The older man grumbled under his breath, ‘Aye, though it keeps us from our trade half the day and there’s rent to be earned. Regular passengers of ours crossing the river in our rivals’ boats.’
Harriet looked directly at him, her eyes frowning. ‘I know you, Proctor.’
He smiled and kept looking at his boots, saying, ‘Why, you’re as good as your husband for a face, Mrs Westerman. I would not have spoken, but I served with the Captain when he was nothing but a scrap of a lad, and he touched his hat to me a few times in Gibraltar when you were there and on his arm, and looking as pretty a thing as ever man got hold of.’
Harriet’s eyes brightened. ‘Of course! James told me you stood between him and a whipping once.’
Proctor laughed, a great throaty rumble from his belly. ‘I did, I did. Told you that, did he? He returned the favour in time.’ He cleared his throat and examined the earth floor with great concentration. ‘Sorry to hear he’s gone a bit . . .’ He touched his hand to his forehead. ‘We’ve been grieving for you and the little ones up and down the river. Us that know him.’
Harriet found she could not speak, but she nodded.
‘So tell us then,’ Crowther asked. ‘How was this man tied?’
The younger man stepped forward and flicked the bottom end of the sheet up the body a little brutally, letting them see a pair of sodden white stockings and the start of the pale breeches above them. The ankles were bound together with rope the thickness of a thumb. Its long end had been neatly curled across the dead man’s shins when he had been laid on the table, rather than cut free or left trailing on the earth floor. Harriet’s mind flickered with images of ropes coiled on the decks of her husband’s commands. She believed a sailor would stop to neaten any piece of loose stuff like that, even if he saw it in a burning house. The stockings dripped onto the floor.
‘See for yourlf,’ Jackson said. ‘The other end of the rope was tied to something heavy enough to hold him against the tide. Meant to hold him under, I reckon, though if it was meant to hide him too, it did a poor job in the end. We spotted him from the bank just after dawn. You could see wig and coat enough to guess it was a man.’
Proctor put his head on one side and pulled at his beard. ‘Another three, maybe four yards out towards the middle of the river and we’d never have seen him till the fish were done feasting. Tide is a monster on the Thames. Where he was stuck, he would have been covered by ten feet at high water. Funny rope too.’ Crowther lifted his eyebrows and Proctor pulled harder on his beard. ‘It’s braided. Not laid.’ Harriet nodded, and Proctor met her eye, satisfied to see she had understood. ‘I’ve not seen it used much on the river, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘Thank you, Proctor,’ Crowther said. ‘May I ask if you found anything on this man’s body? And how did you know his name?’
The two men in front of him looked rather uncomfortable. It was Proctor who replied.
‘His pockets were empty, and there was no fancy stuff on him. As to his name, some woman in the crowd spoke it, but she was gone before she said any more. I don’t know this fella. Can’t have much business across the river, or far along it, or we’d have seen the face, I’d reckon.’
Crowther nodded. ‘Very well, and thank you.’ Then, turning to his host he added, ‘And thank you, Mr Pither. You may all leave us with the body.’
The three men shuffled out, but as he passed her, Proctor put his hand out and Harriet felt it close with gentle pressure on her arm. She looked up into his face and saw her own history of foreign waters and winds behind his eyes. It was only a moment, and he was gone, ushered back out into the yard by Mr Pither, who looked, beside him, like a pilot fish trying to shepherd a whale.
I.7
I
N JOCASTA BLIGH’S early days in Town, when she worked in the Rose and Grape tavern in the thick of the city, she’d lived in rooms shared with ten others where the banisters were stolen to feed the feeble fires of the residents. A hard place to keep yourself to yourself if that was what you wished, though Jocasta had managed it. Then the cards had arrived, whistling and chattering into her life.
They had come to her by accident or chance, as most things do. She’d discovered them, a little greasy and torn, wrapped in a newspaper, in a dingy corner of the dingy bar where she earned enough pennies to keep from starving. She kept them about her, thinking their owner might come back and ask for them, but a month later no one had done so, and she had grown to like looking through the pictures of strange people, the designs that looked like playing cards, but weren’t. Cups and swords, coins and clubs; men, women, stars and angels. Then a seed-merchant, a Frenchman, had spotted her dealing them to herself in a quiet moment when the publican wasn’t hovering, and had some talk with her. The cards were known in his country, he said, people used them to tell fortunes, and for a week he found her out everyht and told her more; the meanings he gave to the pictures, and how to lay down the cards so their messages bled into each other to make new stories. It was like mixing wines, he told her. One card lay next to another, and some new thing emerged that tasted like neither, only existing where they joined.
The regulars thought for a while that the ‘Northern Fortress’, – what they called her in those days – might have been breached. But there was nothing in that. Jocasta learned; the seed-merchant completed his business in London and left; and she was there with her picture cards and a little hope.
The drinkers heard and asked, so she started telling fortunes for the people who drifted through the bar, getting them to lay down the cards and turn them over. People began to seek her out, scraping up pennies and the occasional shilling to have her tell them what she heard in the pictures till she found herself with enough chink in her pockets to take this room and leave off working for others. Twenty years ago now that was. Twenty years of pretty comfortable with a candle. Men she avoided, but for the last ten years she’d had Boyo. She was grateful, and when she had walked her feet off to arrive in London, having abandoned her home of mountains and lakes, she had never expected to feel like that again.
Not happy though. Every now and again, just when you were feeling a little too at ease, the cards had a habit of tapping you sharplike on the shoulder and reminding you there was a price to be paid still. She did not like having to know some of the things they insisted on telling her. There had been a knock or two at the door since Kate Mitchell went off, but Jocasta hadn’t moved from her place or shifted the lay she had made for the young woman.
Jocasta looked hard at the cards till her head began to ache. All Swords. A dark woman. The Magician with his sticks and balls laid out before him, upside down. The Moon all sick and fading, The Hermit with his lantern and stick like the watchman up in Seven Dials – it was so like the man you’d have said they’d used him as a model. Then The Tower. Most of the cards could be kind or vicious with their predictions, depending on how they fell and what conversations they had with their place or the other cards near them. The Tower she’d never seen as anything but angry, though.
She smelled the sea again. She’d only seen it the once, but she remembered the stink. Then she got again that smoky smell, and these lies. Not the normal man-woman lies, not the kind ones or the cruel, or the words you just let slip that might be true when you say them but are lies as soon as sunlight hits them. Those lies she saw in the cards all the time, but these were others. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes. Had the thing been done? Was there still any stopping of it? That the cards would not tell her.
Once, when she was just beginning to turn the cards for other people in the tavern and winter was making the roads more dirty and foul than ever, a man had asked to have his fortune read as a lark with his friends. She’d laid them out and looked up into his square red face, and blurted out that he would be dead before the year’s end. He’d stopped laughing, but asked her how, all the time acting like he was paying no mind to it. Again, without a thought she told him he’d be hung, and he pushed his way out of the bar and onto the streets in a rage. His friends had thought it all fine entertainment and given her more than she usually asked for in coins, then followed him out. The next day the whole street was alive with the story, and Jocasta felt ashamed. The day after, news reached them that the man had been taken up by one of the thief-takers, was a known highwayman and was likely to be at Tyburn before the end of the month.
Jocasta immediately became famous in the parish and found herself dealing cards a dozen times a day. She’d been to the execution, saw the cart bringing the man from Newgate with the priest beside him and the crowd cheering. She was sure he’d noticed her in the mass of people, and nodded to her. The crowd loved him. He went bravely with his head up. Jocasta spent two pennies on a pamphlet of his last confession and got a boy who’d been to the charity school to read it to her. The wood-cut didn’t look much like him, and the words, though entertaining in their account of his terrible crimes, didn’t sound as if they came from his mouth. Jocasta couldn’t watch the drop; just heard it, the clap of the opening trapdoor in that moment of stillness, then the roar of the crowd. She had felt sick and wouldn’t read cards for a week. Then she got hungry.
With a growl she swept the cards up again and sat them in their box. Another knock came at the door, and this time she answered it.
When Harriet folded back the damp sheet from the corpse, she found herself being oddly precise about her movements. She was aware that Crowther was, for the time being, still more engaged in watching her than looking at the body.
‘Crowther, I am quite well. I have heard more hurtful words about my husband’s current condition than those Proctor just used, and with less care and respect in them.’
Her companion did no more than nod, but it seemed the reassurance was sufficient. He continued to lay his knives and hooks on the bench in front of him.
‘I must be a little more subtle in my arts here, than we were in Thornleigh,’ he said. ‘The cut throat on the body you used then as an introduction to myself was a more obvious cause of death than drowning.’
Harriet smiled a little at his characterisation of their meeting. She had bullied her way into his house, she had forced him to place himself in danger, she had caused his most private griefs to become public, yet they had developed between them a friendship that was as valuable to her as the love of her own family.
Since the events of the previous summer he had become a regular companion in her house in Caveley. He would arrive unannounced when the mood took him – or, if he had taken delivery of some exciting preparation or curiosity, they would not see him for a week. She missed him greatly at these times, though she would never admit it, or tease him for ignoring them when he returned. To Harriet’s younger, orphaned sister Rachel, he took the role of an uncle, encouraging her, tolerating her, or ignoring her depending on his mood and Rachel’s choice of conversation. To her children he also stood something like an uncle. He did not join in their games, but would answer any question her son could think of to ask, until, when he grew tired of the circling logic of a seven year old, he would declare himself hungry and in need of a child to eat, whereupon Stephen would scram with delight and run from the room . . .